Ryan Vet on Our Future is Kind: The Human Advantage in the Age of AI

Michael, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thank you for that. My whole life I've been entrepreneurial, and I have done everything from the quintessential lemonade stand back when I lived in the suburbs of Chicago, all the way to a multinational marketing firm as a teenager, to several different startups ranging from enterprise software — that's really boring, but you're grateful for it, you just don't know it's working in the background — to medical device and many things in between. And through all of that I learned there are two constants in every business. The first one is time. Time is a pretty equal offender. We all have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and I won't do more calculations than that, otherwise my math will get wonky. But the reality is we have a finite amount of time and we're all up against the same clock. And the second thing, and I think what makes this conversation so exciting for me, is people. You can't have a business without people. You're always serving others or being served by others. And I think for a long time early in my business ventures, I always put people first. That's actually been a mantra, and in some other videos that we've created in training materials for one of my companies there's a video called Put People First. But it took me a long time to figure out just how important that was and what that meant, and how to be kind to everybody that we encounter, and the profound impact that makes — not just in that moment, but potentially for the rest of someone's life.

Yeah. I think at the core — and I think this is what we lose so much in our modern context — we're human beings interacting with other human beings. And I know that sounds basic and watered down, but a lot of the generational research I do and a lot of the studying I do and things I unpack, that's what it boils down to at the core. We're humans that have different life experiences. And it's a lot easier in many respects to meet someone in a different — let's say you move to a different state and they're kind of the same age, they seem like they like the same things as you. It's easier for you to connect with them, and yet your backgrounds could be radically different because you were culturally raised differently. Well, the same is true with generational cohorts. So now you've got a whole group of people. And I think one of the biggest dangers that I see leaders, and really anyone, follow is this idea of labeling these generations. It's probably one of the most unkind things you can do. And yet it's how society looks at Gen Z, or Gen Alpha, or now Gen Beta being born here in 2026 and beyond. I think we so often get fixated on what are those things that make us different, what are those things that make us unique, that we have to stick a label on it. And I think that is a detriment to all of us.

Yeah, absolutely. And obviously a lot of my research is based on labels, so I can't throw them out the window, but I like to call it a prism. If you look at a prism, you've got two sides of a pyramid, and then what refracts — it's the light. And I look at the Generational Prism as age on one side of the pyramid, moment on the other, and then the label is the bottom. It's the base. It's what comes out of light being shown through that. So I'll give you an example to make it practical, because that's abstract.

The age would say, at a certain age, what consistent traits are there across the board? Let's look at age 25 and say, okay, at age 25 across the board, let's look at boomers, then Gen X, then millennials. Let's see what label sticks. And one of the labels that millennials got so often was job hoppers. They're going to hop from job to job, they're disloyal, they can't stay committed. So let's take Bureau of Labor Statistics at age 25 in every one of those different moments in history. We're going to take it in the '70s, in the late '80s, and then in the early 2000s for each one of those generations, and figure out, okay, at age 25, how many times are they hopping jobs? So how many times do you think baby boomers hopped jobs by the time they're 25?

Once or none. Okay, great. What about Gen X? I'll give you the real answers, I promise.

Two times. Okay. So we're increasing. We're thinking the younger you get, or the more modern you get, the more you're increasing. Okay. What about millennials?

All right. I love it. So the real data is from Bureau of Labor Statistics and a couple other studies. That first cohort, boomers, they hopped jobs by age 25 5.3 times.

Gen X — and we'll unpack why it blows your mind in just a second — Gen X also 5.3 times by age 25. So let's look at millennials. How many times do you think they hopped jobs?

Seven. It's 5.6 times.

So all of a sudden it's like, okay, wait, this doesn't make sense. So let's look at the age, moment, label framework again. We have their age at age 25. Now let's look at the moment of each one of those generations. The moment for baby boomers is their first job was around 10 or 11. There were no child labor laws. So over the course of 15 years, they hopped jobs about 5.3 times. We would believe that they were flipping burgers one day, scooping Dairy Queen ice cream — or soft serving Dairy Queen ice cream — the next day, whatever it was. Gen X, we see that fast forward to 14 or 15 years old for their first job, because child labor laws in some areas are starting to come into play. There's less farm work, less agricultural work, less main street business work. And so we see that now. Millennials, fast forward, you're 19 years old in their moment for their first job. And 19 doesn't seem like they've graduated college, but that's an average. That means people are working between 16 and 22 for their graduation rate. So people are hopping those first jobs in a very finite amount of time, very rapidly.

That's what I talk about when we look at the prism, because the data — and not all data lines up. Some generations have staggeringly different things. But that's one of the easiest ones to say, okay, it's easy to label and say what's true about this generation. But when we really want to think about how we can have an impact on people, it's like, what was I doing at that age? And not only what was I doing at that age, but what was going on in history, in society, in culture, in politics, in the legal structure, in the world that I was raised in that allowed me to do or not to do that thing. And so I think that's a really helpful framework.

Yeah, finding the right person for a new role. I think it comes down to something fundamental. And a big shift, if you look at leadership and management, is we've moved away from this idea of leadership to management. Meaning we're going to manage the people, and really we should be managing tasks instead — and leading people. And I think that's been a big change, because we don't like the behaviors that we're seeing. It's commonly brought up in a parenting technique, too. Some parents manage behavior. They don't like the way their kid behaves in a certain way, so they manage to behavior, instead of leading the kids, saying this is why we do or don't do that thing and here's the implications of that. Two very different parenting techniques. And so the first and foremost thing when you're hiring anyone is, are they a culture fit? Do they align with the organizational values? Do they believe in the vision and mission? And beyond all of those things, the first thing is, do they have character? Are they a person of integrity, honesty? If you have those things, if there's a culture fit, they've got character, then you can really overcome a lot of the generational issues. Doesn't mean instantly, because there's a $1.2 trillion communication issue in large part due to generational communication conflict in the workforce today. So I'm not saying that hiring the right person solves everything, but that's a big step in the right direction. And I think there's been such a labor shortage, quite frankly, in some of the entry-level jobs. And that's for two reasons. One of the big reasons is a lot of Gen Z individuals aren't necessarily wanting to take those roles. They expect that they can do more, and many times they actually can, because they have access to technology that previous generations didn't use. And so they feel that in many cases they're more superior, or above, certain entry-level roles.

Yeah. And that's where the generational labels — as much as I think a lot of the labels lie, there's a lot of accuracy to specific cohorts doing certain things. One of the things that I'll just debunk real quick is every generation says the next generation's lazy. Silent Generation said baby boomers were lazy for going to air-conditioned jobs, sitting behind a desk. Boomers said Gen X was lazy because they had typewriters and early computers. Gen X said millennials are lazy because millennials would do exactly the task you asked but never more, and they would finish it fast so it seemed like they weren't working, and so on and so forth. So I think that's always one of the issues when you're looking at the next generation. But you also have to pause. We're in a unique point in history where I don't want to excuse a generation, because as leaders it's our job to still bring the next generation along. And we have to remember that. We have to remember that training and leading is frustrating sometimes and that's part of the job we've chosen, and we can't just brush it off because it's kids these days. But I think what's really interesting is we do have a generation, particularly with Gen Z, later-born millennials, and we'll see it with Gen Alpha — Gen Alpha only turned 13 this year, but that means in two or three years they'll be able to work with a worker's permit. With Gen Z, you're seeing a generation that was raised on social media. Not that millennials weren't, but there's a big difference between millennials who got it after they were past the key developmental years, and now Gen Z who throughout their childhood and into their developmental years were shaped by, quite frankly, the algorithm. And so this leads to all sorts of new concerns that didn't exist in previous generations, or didn't manifest in the same way that we're seeing it with — I'll use kids these days. Not as a derogatory phrase, but there is a younger undercurrent that does have some unique tendencies and it's caused them to act differently in the world. In many ways, they resemble some traits of the Silent Generation, where factions of them are actually going extremely conservative. And then you've got others that are more embodying Gen X, that are going anti-establishment. They want to go against anything that's organizational. And so you're seeing this happen and you're creating this polarity within a generation. And labeling Gen Z can get extremely dangerous, because you say they're X — well, not Generation X, but there's something. And then all of a sudden you have two Gen Zers that are completely opposite of even one another, in large part because of the moment in which they were raised.

Yeah, the AI conversation is one that's near and dear to my heart. I do not establish myself as an AI expert at all. I will say my earliest startups back in 2009, 2010, they were AI startups. We were writing algorithms and formulas on napkins and whiteboards. So I do have a little bit of background in this. I'm not an engineer, I'm not as smart as an engineer, nor will I claim to be, but I understand the foundations of it and what we were doing back then 15 years ago, and how it's evolved. And I think there's several things that we're seeing at play in the workforce and how it's going to impact jobs. First of all, it is going to replace jobs. It already has replaced jobs and it's doing it quickly, and it is eliminating entry-level jobs. So I'm not going to shy away from that as a fact that's happening. And yet with every major technological innovation — look at the computer. In 1968, there was a Senate subcommittee hearing that said the computer would enable us to have a 22-hour work week within 15 years, and the average American would retire by 38. Was that incorrect? It actually wasn't totally incorrect, because the output was what they were measuring. And that's true. In 22 hours, the computer allowed, in just a 15-year time span, those employees to do what used to take 40 or 50 hours. So we're seeing the same thing here. But the computer also opened new things, like software developers and CompUSA and Circuit City, and new jobs that you didn't have before. So yes, AI is going to absolutely replace roles. It's also going to open up incredible new roles. So that's just going to be tension for the next little bit.

But the other thing you mentioned was, is this a tool? And I go back to the earliest idea of a tool. We're talking about hammers, one of the first tools that we saw. A hammer is great because it can help you build a house, but a hammer itself does not give you shelter. And I think that's how we need to look at AI. AI is an incredible tool. It can do things that most people don't even understand what it can do. And yet we have to remember it's a hammer. It's not going to solve everything. And I think where we're seeing a big friction point right now, and a big issue in culture and society with all generations, is what I call the velocity gap. That's when technology has surpassed morality. Meaning technology has advanced so quickly, it takes a long time for us to figure out what's right or wrong, or the implications to the human race as a result of it. And we saw that first with cell phones. We saw a lot of tragedy in teens — whether that be taking their own life or getting involved in eating disorders or other things at a rapid and rampant rate — and you can argue correlation and causation, but because of social media, that 2012 point and beyond. A lot of great researchers, in the book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. But then you fast forward and you're looking at, that took a decade or more for us to start even having conversations. And here we are 15 years out from that tipping point and we're just now seeing legislation in the United States. We already saw it in Australia, Indonesia, and some other countries, but just now in the United States. The question is, are we going to take that long with AI, and what are the implications of that in our companies and in our communities and in our world?

Yeah. Not to be doom and gloom. I think we're past that. I think it's happened. I think we're already in a place where we're playing past this velocity gap idea. If you look at the '70s — and we don't talk about this often — there was what was called, or referred to now as, the AI winter. There was a moratorium, a letter put out, the Lighthill report, saying, hey, there's a lot of danger with this thing, we should slow down. And again, in 2022 is when it became household language, when ChatGPT became widely available for free to the average consumer and they could see that they could speak or prompt something and get a full essay, or whatever it was. And it was mind-blowing. There was nothing like it that most people had seen to that point. But AI isn't new. And I think what's going to set a lot of companies apart — I don't think you could put a moratorium on it. You try to do it, people are still going to work on AI in the background. And I don't think as leaders we need to wait around for Capitol Hill, or whomever it is, or the companies that are running these platforms, to do — I wouldn't even say the right thing, I don't even play the moral card right now — but to do what's necessary to protect kids, to protect our minds and all that. I think we're seeing massive cognitive erosion. MIT, about a year after ChatGPT became available to the masses, showed brain scans that were quite frightening of what happened when people depended too much on AI. And they were a year in. We're not even talking about longitudinal studies yet to see the impact. And I think when you and I sit back and we're like, oh, generative AI, where all this is going — we forget that you and I have been dependent on it. When was the last time you could go somewhere far away, call it more than 100 miles, without a GPS?

But even with spell check — when we think about spell check in '78 when it first came around, it was the red squiggly line. It didn't tell you what the word should be. It just said you spelled a word incorrectly, because it wasn't in the dictionary. Now it started to give you suggestions, and then it started to give you grammar suggestions. Now you've got Grammarly that will rewrite the whole sentence for you. And so we've become very slowly dependent on these things, and we're blaming it on some magical moment on generative AI and LLMs in 2022. But this has been happening for a long time. So I think the companies that stay ahead and the leaders that stay ahead understand there's great value in the tool, in the hammer, but also compel people to be human and think and have conversations like this that are completely uninterrupted by AI or technology, and start to rebuild those basic cognitive skills and those critical thinking skills that we once found so important when we hired, and now we're not even talking about that.

I think one of the things that we can do — and I'm a living paradox, right? I've got cameras in every angle of my house, 360 degrees outside. I wear a smartwatch and I use AI all the time and have been using it. And yet I also at the same time have young kids in elementary school and below. And it is really important that I think as leaders, as parents, as policy makers, as anyone involved in raising the next generation, even up into their 20s — I think it's really important that we teach those critical thinking skills and those human interaction skills. And I'll break both of those down. First of all, AI is prompted like a human. It's ones and zeros. If you can figure out which ones and zeros to tell it yes to and no to — and I'm way oversimplifying — but it's really not that complicated, especially for what most people are going to use in their workforce. However, if you start programming a machine so much that you're more responsive to its output than to your input, that's a massive problem. The machine's winning. But if you start teaching those critical thinking skills, and never let anyone near any sort of prompt engine at all and just let them think, critical thinking skills — they'll be able to prompt just as well with a couple of quick lessons on how to prompt. It really is that simple.

So when you look at some of these, especially kids in school, because you brought up kids — I think going back to the basics. And as much as I hated handwriting anything, because I grew up with computers in computer labs and you could print out your report, I think there's something lost in that art where your pen is literally hovering on the paper and it's like, am I going to say this word or that word? These things are happening in the background, but that's what makes us think, even if you're writing quickly. And so I think encouraging people to pick which tasks they want to add friction back into. The old adage, no pain no gain — there's a lot of truth to that. We have sought as humankind to eliminate friction because we want a better life, and often in removing friction we remove the very human interactions where we can be kind, because we're reliant on technology. I go back to the 1950s and '60s. If you look at the ads, there's a mother with two kids, a boy and a girl, because it has to be, right, in an ad in the newspaper, and the mother's wearing a plaid apron, very 1950s and '60s, the short curled hair, and it's got her next to a dishwasher. You can look at the Maytag ads and everything else, and it says, spend more time with your kids, let someone else do the dishwashing. Did any mom spend more time with their kids because of the dishwasher? Probably not. And that's not an indictment on mothers of the '50s and '60s, but that was the whole idea of technology. And we've done that over and over and over again. We try to improve the human experience with technology, to the point that we rely on it. And at the end of the day, you can't rely on technology. You've got to rely on other humans.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And I actually think a lot of what I write about, I call the Generational Pendulum, and there's kind of four phases to that. The first is a generation experiences something. The second is they challenge it — so think of a teenager, right. The third is they overcorrect, and finally they come back and recalibrate somewhere. It doesn't land right in the middle. It's somewhere close to the middle, but it's a new path. A teenage example is, you know, parent tells the teenager to clean the room. That's the experience. The teenager is going to challenge it. They're going to overcorrect by putting everything in their closet or under their bed. And at some point when they open their closet and everything falls out on them, the shelves come crashing down, they have to recalibrate and figure out a new normal. But the same is true with every generation. You have a Silent Generation, which makes up less than a percentage point of the workforce this year. They were very loyal to company, to country, and to family. That was what they existed on. Hard workers, a lot of mainstream business, a lot of factory workers, things like that. Then you move to boomers, where you have the first real big wave of white collar in the United States workforce, and they were extremely loyal to the title and to the paycheck and climbing the corporate ladder. Not so much about the company — if the company wasn't feeding them. But if the company was feeding them and stroking their ego, they kept climbing. And you see this kind of go throughout. Well, work-life balance, that term is not the millennials' term, it's Gen X's term. They came up with this idea because they were latchkey kids. They grew up with a two-parent household, two parents working, and so they would come home to an empty house and they didn't want that, and so they started to swing the pendulum back and they were over-involved, and they became helicopter parents to the millennials. And then you have millennials that wanted the Instagram lifestyle, and so everything was filtered, everything was this experiential nature. And now you have Gen Z, which I think we're starting to see a recalibration come back.

So I think there's actually potentially a natural course of action, hope, that that might allow some of those boundaries. If I could ever give Gen Z two words, just two words, it'd be authenticity and boundaries. Those are their two anthem words, if you will. They want boundaries on everything. They want protection, from their personal space to their work-life balance, in ways that we've not seen before in the workforce. But they also want authenticity. They're big truth seekers. They want a single source of the truth and all of that. So you see these two things with this generation, and we're seeing that cause extreme conflict in the workforce, because they'll quiet quit. They'll get hired and never show up for their first day of work. If they're not liking something, they'll leave. They'll take a day — I'll take Monday, meaning it's a personal day, they need a mental health day. And I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with any of those. But I do think there's going to be so much pressure on corporations to figure it out that we might see this swing back to where, okay, there are human beings working and they do have a family life. And, hey, we don't talk about this very often, but this is in our pocket all the time. And you rewind even 30 years, you couldn't get a hold of someone after hours. Now you can get a hold of them whenever you want. So I do think there is some hope in this swing backwards, and I think the recalibration is starting to happen, and that's what's causing so much friction, because change is not easy and older generations really resist change.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of that going on. I think companies are moving faster, and I think when our attention is split — and there's countless studies on this — when our attention is split between so many things, which it is now because of technology and it wasn't before. You would work on a project and you were with that project till that project was done. Now you're working on 50 projects and initiatives, and you have all these new management techniques, so you're doing OKRs or pick the flavor of the month. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with those, but yes, balls get dropped and people aren't caring about people anymore because they're so concerned about making sure that their boss is pleased. So I think that's part of it. And I think that scenario is a very typical Gen Z scenario — demanding truth, and if I don't get my way, I'm not going to stay. And one of the things in there I want to call out, it's true of the last two generations, millennials and Gen Z. A lot of authority figures, if you will, or those in a superior place of leadership, get frustrated with the disrespect. And that disrespect is what I would call trained boldness and friendship. And I'll unpack this. One, millennials and Gen Z both learned that they could hide behind a keyboard and use their words and become very powerful and have a lot of force with those words, unlike any other generation before. And when they were sending those words to people, there were no barriers on who they could communicate with. It's no longer looking up the white pages, having to call a secretary at the time — which you're not even allowed to say anymore — and get through that person to get to whomever you're talking to. Now it's, I can slide into your DMs. It could be the president of the United States. Not that they're reading it, but you could slide into anybody's DMs, a celebrity. So that's one thing. There was this emboldened nature and this dissolution of authority figures. The other thing that started to happen was the friend syndrome, and we saw this with millennials. They were definitely raised in a fear-based childhood, and so parents hovered more closely, hence helicopter parents. And they were also recalibrating the latchkey kid experience that they had growing up. And you started to see coaches became first-name basis. Doctors were no longer Dr. such-and-such, but doctor first name, or even first name. Guidance counselors were no longer one for the school, but one for every three letters of the alphabet, which you could address by first name. Professors dropped their titles. And so you saw what many more mature generations would call disrespect, but it's really how millennials were raised. And Gen Z inherited that same approach — hey, you're my friend, you're my peer, you're not really superior to me, and so I can talk to anyone any way I want anytime I want. And that causes a tremendous amount of friction in the workforce and in families.

Oh, absolutely. And I think the internet is good and bad. I mean, that's a tool, right? That's a hammer. Rate My Professors, or Google reviews at that restaurant you just went to, or whatever it is. And I think the next generation sees a lot of nails and they love swinging that hammer at those nails. And I think that's where it causes so much conflict. And especially, I think the biggest rub you see right now is baby boomers and millennials, but you're starting to see that same rub skip a generation, to Gen X and Gen Z. Just because there's enough of a gap between those two generations, kind of skipping, it causes this greater conflict in communication. It's really fascinating to watch unfold.

Yeah. Gen X is the best generation. I have data to back that up.

Let's do it.

Yeah, I love that question. I've got young kids at home, so Wall-E is a favorite at home. They don't get much screen time, and so they've only seen a handful of movies total. But when we do watch it, Wall-E is usually requested. And I fear that is often where we're going. If those doors were to open 100 years from now, we're glued to screens and just kind of rolling around. But the whole premise of that — spoiler alert for those of you who haven't seen it — there's life form back on Earth, and these people can return back to Earth, and you see true kindness between robots. Not saying that robots can have empathy, we're not even going to unpack that today. But I think what I would love to see, if we were successful in raising the next three generations that would be running things 100 years from now — I think we see those little interactions. That trust. People being people. There's this growing trust amongst human beings, and a large part of that's because of technology. Technology is designed to create fear between us. If I like something, I'll see a little bit of it. But if I dislike something and post a nasty comment, Facebook and Instagram are going to show me 10 times more of that stuff, because it gets me on their platform and it gets me going and I go down the rabbit hole. And I think what can happen — I teach my kids this — every single person you have an interaction with is precious. It's a word we don't use a lot. But if we do this right and we look at 100 years from now, it's people that — it's kind of like Mayberry. Everyone knows each other, you don't have to lock the doors. And I know that's a rosy future and humans are still humans, but I think it's smiling at everybody, learning people's names, getting to know the person that you interact with every single day.

We've got a subscription to a car wash down the road. The only reason I did it was because they gave a month free. But I always tell my kids, hey, smile and wave at anybody that's helping us, serving us. Say thank you. So when you go up to the thing and roll down the window, they always say thank you from the back seat and they wave at the person washing the car. Now they look for my car, and I can't cancel that subscription because they love seeing my kids, my kids love seeing them, they've had gifts for my kids. It's nothing profound — they're smiling through a closed window, waving. But when you order something and send your six-year-old up to order their own food, and the waiter is like, can this kid do it? It's like, yes, they can. And you talk to them and you address them by name if they give you the name, and you look them in the eyes. Just those simple things. If we can get that back, I think that would be an incredibly kind future.

I think it starts with putting your phone down when you're talking to somebody. I mean, again, it sounds trivial, and you can say yes and I'm going to do that — but when was the last time you took off your smartwatch, too? Like, anything that's vibrating, buzzing, glowing, blinking, and you just went completely alone with someone else and just talked to them and interacted with them where you can't be distracted by everything going on. Because technology is designed to keep us involved, right? That's how they make their money. Whether that's the social media platform, or even having your device on at all times and having the other device that links to it so that in case you lose the other device you can — you know, it's a vicious cycle. But I just published an article on loneliness, and it's been two, three years now since the surgeon general issued it as a national concern. And it's across all generations, but loneliness has a U-shaped curve, right? You see it in young adulthood the most, when they kind of leave the bubble — as one of my friends puts it, leaves the greenhouse of college or family life and goes out into the wild world and actually is exposed to the real elements. And then through that middle stage of life you normally are less lonely, because you usually are in some sort of community, you're in a workplace, you're in a family. And then at the end, as life happens and you have fewer friends on planet Earth, loneliness grows again. But what we're seeing is a sharp increase in childhood loneliness, which was never on the charts before. And childhood loneliness all the way up through young adulthood. And now, as that same cohort's moving forward, we're seeing it into middle age. And you can trace that all the way back to family dinners. Silent Generation, 89% of families ate dinner together. Gen Z, they're at 33%.

And what else is so fascinating — this study just came out last year — Gen Z on average, most generations during the week would spend waking hours at home, and they would calculate this. Gen Z has two more waking hours at home than millennials, which makes sense, because millennials were overcommitted in every sport and ballet and whatever else. Two extra hours. And yet they have the lowest family dinner rate ever. And I would argue that's not because the families aren't having dinner together, but if they are, they're all sitting glued to this.

And again, I'm not anti-phone. I'm not anti-technology. I've spent a lot of my life and career in it. But I think if we have the opportunity to influence the next generation to be kind to those around us — a simple wave, a simple smile, looking people in the eye. It sounds stupid saying it. Let's be serious, we all know those are the right things. But we still are too busy, or can't miss that alert, or what if I can't see if my kid's somewhere. It has consumed us, and we're so attached to the machine that we can't be attached to a human being like we used to be.

Yeah. I think we've lost that. I wrote an article last year about how this fear-mongering has created — around child abductions. And if that happens, it's tragic. It is so tragic. But it is also so rare, especially from a stranger. And we've created this whole safety culture, which there's nothing wrong with being safe. We know more than we did now, so we should take steps when we do know more than we did before. At the same time, a lot of this is overcorrection, and we don't let our kids even look at somebody else because we're afraid that something bad might happen. And there is a balance, and that's where parenting has worked for millennia. We're here because the human race has figured out how to navigate those situations. But I think trying to restore some of that street smarts and that common sense is really important, because they're not getting it on technology. That's one of the things that separates a human from a robot. In fact, as anti-AI as some of this has sounded, I created a team of AI agents that I'm giving backstories, as an experiment, right? Because I'm a researcher. I've got to experiment with things. And I still have friends in the tech world, so it's, you know, dangerous. And so I'm trying to experiment with how much programming — some of my favorite team members ever, with some of their stories and life experiences that I know. Can you get that empathy? Can you have that experience pulled in? And you can't. It's not there. Technology is not there. Not saying it can't get there someday, but we're so far away, and it still will never replace a human being interacting with another human being.

Appreciate that, Michael. I speak about 70 times a year on stages around the country and world. So if there's an event in your city, you can check that out on my website and definitely would love to meet you in person. But a way you can instantly plug in totally free, and it will always be free, is my Collide newsletter. You can find that at ryanvet.com. Free resource. It's several thousand words usually a week — like 1,200 to 1,800 a week. So just consider it a small book chapter, about a nine-minute read on average. So it doesn't take much time, but dives into one of these topics and looks at the actual data and where we've been, where we're going as a society, what that means for us as leaders, as human beings in the world. And then I'm on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, you name it. I'm pretty easy to find.

You know what's so funny? In my own backyard, I get booked very rarely. Only a handful of times a year. So as of right now, I don't think there's anything in North Carolina on my calendar. It's just how it works. I actually have a private event this Friday in North Carolina, but it's one of like four total ones this year that I know of. And the other 60-some are, you name it, somewhere else in the country or world.

Thank you, Michael.